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DAVE MUSTAINE On President OBAMA: ‘I’m Disgusted With This Guy’

Last month, MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine once again sat down with noted right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for a face-to-face interview for Infowars.com. The entire 43-minute chat has now been posted online and can be streamed in the YouTube clip below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On the USA becoming a “police state”:

Mustaine: “I’m 50 years old now and I’ve lived a great life and I’ve been around for a long time.

“Most of our fans, or most of the people who are against me, are very young and are very impressionable, which is part of being young.

“That saying that youth is wasted on young people, that’s totally true.

“I remember when I was really young, I was very impressionable and I believed a lot of things before I checked it out. And if I would have been told the things that I do now are gonna affect me later on in life, I would have probably said something like, ‘Well, I don’t know that I’m gonna live that long.’ But now that I’m 50 and I’ve watched so many administrations come and go and I’m watching my children grow up, which is an awesome part of when a man and a woman marry and have children, to watch them grow up, that you have concerns about stuff like that.

“Sometimes our fans that are younger, they look to me as a big brother, or even a father figure, because I really care a lot about them. But I have never been more terrified in my life about what’s happening to our country.

“I believe that if we continue on the same path that we’re on right now that America will never be the same.

“I freaked out the other day because I was looking at some investment stuff, and just reading it, and one of the things that it said was that if you get a second passport and you plan on moving out of the country, if you denounce your citizenship because of the taxes that are going on here or any of the things that are going on in the police state we’ve become, if you wanna get your passport back, you have to know things like, where did you mom live before you were born all the way up to now? Where did she go for prenatal care? Who was in the operating room when you were born? All these ridiculous [things].

“A friend of ours, it’s a wonderful lady that’s friends with my wife, and her husband, who is Canadian, they wanted to go back into Canada and they wouldn’t let them go because there was a tax lien on their house because of a contractor who had done some shady work and they didn’t wanna pay him. So the guy put a lien on their house and they’re in court right now. But they couldn’t even go up to Canada to go visit their relatives.

“But again… looking at these financial things. Because I’m filling out my will and everything right now, because I’m nearing the end of my life. Hopefully I’ll live a long, long time, but I have to face reality. I’m getting at that age where a lot of men make that journey either to heaven — which I think I’m going to — or some to hell. And I was looking at this thing that it said that you cannot open a bank account out of the United States Of America anymore. If I move to England and say I live there for the rest of my life, if I open a bank account there, they have to notify the United States, so that the United States can continue to tax me, even if I don’t live in the United States anymore. And I thought, ‘This is crazy.'”

“When we’re travelling through all the different checkpoints over through Europe, before all the globalization was taking place and each country had its own border and they had their own language and stuff like that, you’d come up to the customs, you’d go to the border, you’d have to stop and hand in your passport and stuff like that and now you just kind of roll through there. But when you come to your own country, it’s harder to come home, it’s harder to go through an airport here in the United States Of America than it was for us to even go to Moscow. We just got back from Moscow and we rolled through there so fast, I was laughing about it. Because we got out of the plane, through customs, got our luggage and were in the vans, rolling to the hotel for the show faster than we get through customs when I come home to the U.S.”

“It’s amazing how our liberties are being taken away from us. It’s like the frog in a pot of boiling water. If it was boiling water when he jumped in, he’d jump back out. But if they slowly turned the temperature up, the frog will stay in there until he boils to death. And that’s what’s happening to us right here. We don’t know what’s going on. A lot of the American people are so busy working their asses off to make ends meet right now, they don’t have time to sit in front of the news, and the news is such pablum, it’s opiate for the masses and it’s stuff that you wanna feel good.”

“For me, the way that I get any kind of solace out of what’s going on right now. Because I’ve been playing for a long time and I don’t plan on playing another 30 years. Although I would like to be able to be able to play music for the rest of my life, I don’t know that I’ll be doing it on the road. The pleasure I get out of that is being on stage, looking at people’s faces, smiling and stuff like that. And the screeching reality is when you travel and you go back through the airports. When we left here last time, my 14-year-old [daughter] was groped by the TSA [Transportation Security Administration]. And I was so mad, I was swearing. And the one very large woman said, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘You heard what I said.’ And Pam, my wife, grabbed me and she said, ‘Don’t say anything.’ Because she knows that these guys are power-drunk and that they probably would have arrested me for just saying something about them groping my 14-year-old.

“The thing that really is blowing me away is this molecular scanner, this [Picosecond Programmable Laser], whatever they’re talking about, and it’s not only here, the Russians have one too, so it’s something that’s very real. And I read up on that and it says it’s about gun powder and explosives and that’s what the primary purpose of it is, but it also says that it can read inside your system and say what kind of medication you’re on. So I imagine that what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna have a database to cross-reference whether the person that shows up that’s got narcotics in their system is under doctor’s care or not. For example, for me, when we’re on tour, we’re around people who do pyro, and pyro is gun powder and explosives for the fireworks. So if I shake hands with my pyrotechnician, I’m gonna get arrested for being a terrorist because I’ve got trace elements of gun powder and explosives on me, because there’s fireworks going on. On top of the fact that because of the cocaine use and people using dollar bills rolled up, there’s traces of cocaine on all money, so anybody touching currency is gonna have remnants of cocaine on their hands, that’s gonna show up, and it’s just madness. To think that it’s getting to this point. I mean, I can handle us having security, but not like this.”

On President Obama‘s misinterpreted comment from a campaign speech in Roanoke, Virginia, in which he said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else did that.”:

Mustaine: “See, the thing that I laugh about when I hear Obama say, ‘Give the folks a chance. Give everybody a chance. Take away from the rich people.’ Well, what happens when the folks that he’s giving a chance gets a chance, becomes successful, is rich. Well, then all of a sudden, you’re Obama‘s enemy now. And the thing for me is that I’m in that 1 percent that he’s talking about. MEGADETH won’t be able to tour anymore once all these things that he’s planning on doing to me happen. And the fact that he would say that I did not build my own business offends me tremendously. I’m disgusted with this guy. He’s my president, I respect the office of the presidency, but I think as a person and the things that he says, I’ve never heard anything this offensive ever come out of the mouth of a president. And I’m 50 — I’ve heard a lot of presidents talk in my life.

“Listeners out there can say what they want about me or be mad at what I’m saying right now. And I’m saying this out of love for you guys. You may not have love in your heart for me, but I have love in my heart for you. And that’s why I’m a public figure and I play music, I try and educate people through lyrics. Some of the songs can be construed as being a little bit unrealistic, some of the songs are a little bit fun — they’re make-believe topics and stuff like that — but songs like ‘Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?!’ are still relevant today, songs like ‘Holy Wars’ are still relevant today. And that wasn’t because I was clever and I came up with the lyrics. I paid attention. I watched what happened through the Carter years, through the Ford years and watched what Jimmy Carter did to our country, taxes at 70 percent when I was growing up and thinking, ‘How on earth did anybody survive back then?’ For me, when you take out 5 percent for the business manager, 15 percent for the personal manager, 10 percent for the agent and 45 percent for taxes, what’s left for Dave? And people think, ‘Oh, Dave is a millionaire.’ No, Dave isn’t. Dave‘s an American that’s getting plowed by the government.”

“The funny thing was many years ago, when Obama first got in office, I said something, I was in Australia, and I was on the radio and a lot of people took exception to what I said. I said that he was the most divisive president that I’ve ever seen. And look what’s happening right now — there’s race wars, there’s class wars, there’s sexual wars now, there’s religious wars. Don’t we remember how smooth this guy was when he was saying that we’re gonna bring together and he was for change and hope?”

“Why hasn’t somebody moved to impeach this man? With all of the proof about his birth certificate being fake. And you see the signs in Kenya that say ‘the birthplace of Barack Obama.’ Hello?! C’mon, guys. How stupid are we right now? I guess the best revenge is when you look back in history at what Michelle [Obama] wore at his inauguration and she had a black dress on with two red triangles, so she looked like a black widow turned upside down. So there’s gotta be some symbology there. You just don’t wear something like that to some event like that without there being some kind of future message being told.”

On who he is and what he stands for:

Mustaine: “I’m a Christian man who loves his family, loves his country and, most importantly, loves God, and I’m willing to fight for those things. And I’m willing to share those things with the people who would like to know about it. I’m not willing to get into it with people who don’t care about it. I’m not gonna defend myself or explain myself; it is what it is.”

On MEGADETH‘s plans for the immediate future:

Mustaine: “Well, we’re really excited about what’s going on. We’re getting ready to do a new record. We’re leaving in a couple of days for Asia, and we’ll be coming back and continuing work on this new record. And we’ll go to South America in September and come back and continue to do work on the new record. We’re looking for a new release the beginning of next spring, hopefully.

“We’re super, super excited about what’s going on for us. We’ve continued to congeal as a band, with [bassist] David Ellefson coming back and he and [drummer] Shawn Drover as our rhythm section. It’s very important that the bass player and the drummer are tight. And David is such an excellent bassist and Shawn is such a great drummer, the two of them just needed to be familiar with one another. They spend time together all day long when we’re on tour, travelling and doing things — mostly seeking out Starbucks around the world. [laughs]

“I’m excited about the music that we’re gonna be writing. We just changed agencies; we’re with the prestigious CAA agency in Beverly Hills. We’re gonna be going to sign a new contract for our recording career. Our contract with Roadrunner‘s up. We haven’t really notified anybody what our decision is; we’re still kind of deciding. But for the most part, we’re getting ready to record this next record and I’m sure it’s gonna be chock-full of all kinds of subject matter that our Class Of 2008 has given us.”

On MEGADETH experiencing a resurgence in popularity:

Mustaine: “Music is cyclical, and heavy metal , in general, is more popular when times are tough, which is a terrible dynamic; it you look at the paradigm. Heavy metal music should not be successful when people are struggling. But they don’t wanna hear a bunch of vapid, anorexic, alternative, androgynous guys that are singing about love and flowers and these kind of ecstacy trips and stuff. They wanna know what’s going on, they wanna know what’s happening in their world and they wanna have people they can look to who are rugged individuals who don’t look like they could very easily be your sister. [laughs] And they want to have somebody that they can believe in, somebody who’s been successful.”